Category: Dasheroo Case Studies

There are many different reasons why companies decide to use a business dashboard reporting tool. Some do so to stay organized. Others do so to better understand the key metrics that drive business performance. And some simply love the data!

In this Customer Spotlight, we’re going to learn how one company – OVO Mobile – is using Dasheroo to monitor their important KPIs and keep their team members updated in real-time. We recently chatted with Matt Jones over at OVO Mobile to learn more about his company and the different ways they are using dashboards to run their business.

Dasheroo: Hi there Matt! Thanks for joining us today. To kick things off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Matt: Sure thing. I’m currently the CEO of OVO Mobile and we’re based here in beautiful Sydney, Australia. I’ve got an extensive background in the telecommunications space having previously held executive leadership roles at Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, AAPT, and Telecom New Zealand as well as global management consulting firms including BearingPoint.

Dasheroo: How long has OVO Mobile been in business?

Matt: I founded the company with two other partners in 2014. In 2015 we had
our official public launch. Things are going really well for us and the growth is very exciting. We currently have an Australian audience estimated at over 7 million and we’ve won some prestigious awards including the Money Magazine “Best of the Best” Award 2017.

Dasheroo: What types of products or services does OVO Mobile provide? Who is your typical customer?

Matt: In short, we provide our customers with prepaid mobile services that bring together telecommunications with media rights and digital broadcast for mass distribution.

Our typical customer is often a sports fan looking for great streaming content including gymnastics and motorsport (e.g. superbikes, drags, and Audi Racing).

Our core goal is to drive the convergence of telco and media, providing fans content they are passionate about; data free and unlimited.

Dasheroo: What was the main reason you started looking for a dashboard reporting tool?

Matt: We wanted a simple dashboard for inclusion in our corporate reports, as well as something that could be displayed on our TVs in the lobby of our office. Also, we were seeking something that could provide real-time alerts and notifications for specific key KPIs.

Dasheroo: How has Dasheroo helped you achieve these goals?

Matt: First off, we’ve been able to create some slick dashboards to track key metrics across important areas of our business including advertising, sales, and social media.

In addition, we absolutely love Dasheroo’s “Alerts” feature! Every day, we get a summary of sales for the day. This drives all types of activities. For example, if the volume is low, this triggers an investigation into our technology and sales channels to confirm that nothing is wrong. Conversely, when sales are higher than usual, it starts a positive conversation across the business.

Dasheroo: What advice would you give to organizations who are considering a dashboard reporting tool?

Matt: There are plenty of reporting tools to choose from, but if you’re looking for a platform that is built to proactively keep a team informed, while also providing a simple and efficient setup, Dasheroo is your friend. 🙂

Conclusion

Awww, thanks Matt and Team OVO — we’re big fans of yours too! We look forward to helping you track all your important metrics as you continue to grow, and we’ll keep improving Dasheroo to meet your needs along the way. Best of luck to you!

I know we’ve been quiet since announcing that we were winding down, but some great things have happened since we made that announcement in early October.

It turns out we got a bunch of interest from companies wanting to acquire Dasheroo for our expertise in helping businesses manage their KPIs. But the exciting news is that one very special company, led by long-term leaders in the small business marketing space, decided that Dasheroo was a great match and fit really well with the services they provide. We couldn’t agree more!

Yep, Dasheroo has been acquired, and we couldn’t be happier.

We want to give you a heads up, but an official announcement with more details will be made on Tuesday, December 6.

We both share a passion for helping small and mid-size businesses thrive, and now this combined company will help you take advantage of even more ways to grow your business.

So what does this mean for Dasheroo users?

Most importantly, your dashboards will live on and you’ll be able to keep tracking your important KPIs within Dasheroo!

Dasheroo will be a key part of a broader suite of amazing marketing automation & customer retention tools.

There’s going to be significant investment to support and grow the Dasheroo product so you’ll see more enhancements and new features.

For Dasheroo users who were previously on a paid plan prior to September 30, we’ll be extending our original promise of free service to December 15 until December 31st, 2016. After that, we’ll resume billing.

We had the opportunity to catch up with Dasheroo users Adam and Dillon, founders of Front of House. Front of House is a NYC-based digital marketing and content creation agency that caters heavily to the food & beverage scene, singing a new age, content driven & analytic supported song in an industry whose marketing sounds have been notoriously flat.

We love to hear exactly how Dasheroo users are using their dashboards. Here are the answers to the tough questions we love to ask.

Can you describe your team of 10?

Dillon: Adam and I are split partners and both oversee operations. We have two account executives who oversee the operations of 10 or so accounts each, a full time photographer, one full time graphic and web designer, two account managers who monitor, post and community manage our accounts and two outreach associates who strategically grow our clients social community.

What did you use before you found Dasheroo? How long did it take you to gather your metrics?

Dillon: Prior to using Dasheroo we manually developed month end reports using a mixture of Iconosquare, Sprout Social and Facebook/Twitter reports. It was a monthly pain in the ass and probably took us 8 hours a month but it got the job done and provided us the flexibility we needed. We found manually generating short 4 or 5 page PDF’s provided relevant info to satisfy clients. Analytic relevance is huge for us because the food space is so unique in its offering. Unlike many of today’s major digital industries, the F&B/hospitality’s product is truly tangible. Its easy to track the sale of an iPhone case through Instagram, its not the same story with a cheeseburger. So although the industry’s ROI will presumably never be fully trackable we needed our dashboards to showcase some metrics other industries may not feature so predominantly.

What were the most important features you need in a dashboard for FOH?

Dillon: We look heavily to Instagram as our primary platform so it is heavily prioritized but in terms of reporting we look to similar metrics across the board. Engagement, Follower Growth and Recent Activity. Many of our clients provide us with complete creative control, its the reason we are hired. So providing a concise month or week end recap is crucial for them. Rather than spending 20 minutes a day checking in on us, they spend an hour at the end of each month. We would love a bit.ly integration and a few other tweaks to Dasheroo would be hugely beneficial to us but it really pulls almost all of the data we could want.

Did you gain any new insight using Dasheroo?

Dillon: We haven’t gained any new insights but it seems to be saving us quite a bit of time.

Does more than one team member use Dasheroo? What other functions in the company?

Dillon: Since we started using Dasheroo we’ve on-boarded all of our employees to the organization. Its a tool I’d like every team member to be proficient in. We’ve also shared our Dashboards with clients who are interested in a more real time snapshot of their accounts – which is an incredible tool.

And there it is, Dasheroo gives you more time to run your business. Thanks again to Dillon and Adam!

We caught up with a Dasheroo user Jeff Hunter, Founder of VA Staffer, a global virtual assistant marketing agency that specializes in managing social media marketing for a number of clients. We always love when we get more insight on how our users really use our dashboards so we fired a few questions Jeff’s way.

How many employees work at VA Staffer?

Jeff: We’ve got 35 employees in total, 4 here in the US, 1 in India, 1 in Brazil, and the rest are in the Philippines. We’re truly global!

What did you use before you found Dasheroo dashboards? How long did it take you to gather your metrics?

Jeff: We used the old method of logging into each of application separately, trying to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Google Analytics, Stripe, Paypal, email autoresponder performance and list goes on. For us the time it took was a huge problem – probably a good hour or two to dig in, analyze, and then create actionable intelligence based from findings. With Dasheroo, we log in (PS. I LOVE the mobile app), and I can view our company’s key performance indicators immediately.

What were the most important features you needed in a dashboard for VA Staffer?

Jeff: Monitoring our social media dashboard for both social metrics and website growth are by far the most important. The convenience of our received payments for both paypal and stripe are very useful for me to quickly see how we’re doing compared to our forecasting.

Did you gain any new insight using Dasheroo?

Jeff: Absolutely, comparing social media campaigns and email campaigns was a huge benefit for us. It’s great to see how effective campaigns are in an instant, it gives us the intelligence to refocus efforts on what’s working, and not miss opportunities by wasting time researching our own data.

Does more than one team member use Dasheroo? What other functions in the company?

Jeff: We have several team members, and as a virtual assistant marketing agency we’ve rolled it out for a number of our clients. We have clients that have Shopify stores that love the instant dashboard portal, as well as the top products. We also manage several social media campaigns for dozens of clients and we’re able to review performance and offer measurable results with goal setting so it grows our relationships. It’s a huge selling point for our company, since social media is a huge mystery to even the most developed companies who have still failed to master measurement of success.

At Dasheroo, we love hearing cool stories from our customers. This is particularly true when they tell us how our business
dashboards save them time and money. Raffe Gold, CEO of Transcend Social, is one of the most interesting guys you will ever meet. And not just because his company has offices on three continents!

What do they do? Transcend Social provides you with a fully-featured, end-to-end service to help you create, maintain and take advantage of everything that online marketing has to offer. A truly awesome agency.

Dasheroo Steps Up for Transcend Social

As the CEO of a company that is spread out all over the world, Raffe was looking for a way to stay connected, share data, and of course, provide clients with a higher level of service.

After many months of using another service that cost Transcend Social entirely too much money, his search for a new business dashboard provider began. This time around, affordability and a “straight forward” approach was priority number one.
Gold said, “We have been using Dasheroo for five months, and have fallen in love with the unified view of metrics, the awesome data visualization, and the value it provides.”

Saving Time with Dasheroo

A company like Transcend Social and a CEO like Raffe Gold do not have a lot of time to waste. Unfortunately, this is exactly what they were doing before finding Dasheroo.

It took many weeks to gather and translate data, review results, and implement changes. Imagine doing this for hundreds of clients. Doesn’t sound fun, does it?

While saving time, Raffe also found that Dasheroo provided a leg up on the competition. Many other agencies only look at numbers. They don’t share “engagement” data with clients. And they definitely don’t share information on the reasoning behind engagement. Transcend Social now has a unique selling feature that clients eat up!

A Feature for Everyone

Every TS-Dasheroo user has his or her own way of doing things. The Transcend Social team was looking for a distinct set of features, with Raffe sharing the following:

“Dashboard exports make it so easy for us to send professional looking reports to clients whenever we want. Furthermore, we enjoy the different themes as this allows us to add some color and life.”

Additionally, and just as important, is the way that Dasheroo enables client communication within its dashboards. “We are always in touch with our clients, so being able to add and read comments in the dashboard is a big deal,” he added.

The Many Sides of Dasheroo

In a relatively short period of time, Transcend Social has found many ways to use Dasheroo.

Previously, the company struggled to create data-filled reports that clients could understand. Upon implementing Dasheroo business dashboards, Raffe has gained new insight on client campaigns.

“Engagement rate insights are awesome. Anyone would love to see these, however, other services don’t offer such data. The ability to see the quantified number of people engaging is fantastic.”

All in all, Raffe Gold loves Dasheroo because it “speaks to him.” He doesn’t want to browse an Excel spreadsheet for hours on end or spend time creating complex reports. We are upfront and center, and that is huge for him!

The SeaLink Travel Group is one of Australia’s largest travel and tourism businesses and an early adopter of Dasheroo. After learning that the company uses us to track KPIs associated with many of its 11 brands, we reached out to learn more.

Rubina Carlson, SeaLink’s Digital Marketing Coordinator, is tasked with managing five of the company’s 11 brands! With three to four social media networks for each brand, it’s easy to see how Rubina could run into issues with tracking KPIs, time management, and measuring performance.

We touched based with Rubina to discuss how Dasheroo helps each brand outperform the competition. Here’s her story (don’t be surprised if it sounds familiar!)

From managing social media accounts to optimizing paid advertising campaigns (AdWords and Bing), every day is packed full of data, statistics, and of course, many questions from some of the company’s 600+ employees.

With so much on her plate, Rubina found herself spread thin and unable to work in an efficient manner.

Her Challenges

Managing data for one brand is difficult enough. Doing so for five brands can be a next to impossible task.

With a strong focus on digital marketing, SeaLink must take advantage of the KPIs that are available. This means three things:

Measuring what is and isn’t working.

Assessing the strategy daily (if not hourly).

Optimizing for better results.

And when all this is done, there are still monthly reports to be created for the management team.

Then Came Dasheroo…

Before implementing Dasheroo, Rubina struggled to find enough time in the day to manage each brand, optimize, and track key data. But ever since discovering Dasheroo, things have changed.

She said, “I came to learn more about Dasheroo after reading rave reviews in a large Facebook group for Australian digital marketers. While I checked out a few competitors, it was the features and price that caught my eye.”

After creating the dashboard, Rubina experienced what she had been missing. Soon enough, her monthly reporting time dwindled from three days to three hours. Best yet, the reports included more detailed information, including targeted data for each social media platform and campaign.

Rubina discussed a variety of other benefits provided by Dasheroo:

Ability to create a dashboard for each brand.

Easy to review and understand the data.

Direct impact on marketing programs.

Data visualization tool that makes the information easy to digest.

When asked about her favorite feature, Rubina shared the following:

“I enjoy the fact that Dasheroo supports every platform we use. This guarantees that I can review the most important data for each brand, all in the same place.”

What’s Next?

In the months to come, the SeaLink Travel Group plans on implementing sharing as a means of getting more employees involved.

And of course, just like many of you, Rubina and the rest of her team are looking forward to Alerts.

“Dasheroo has allowed me to more efficiently and effectively manage five brands that are essential to SeaLink’s success. In the future, we’ll definitely look into additional integrations.”

When we found out that Texas Christian University used Dasheroo to track their KPIs with our dashboards we couldn’t wait to talk to them to find how how and why. So we reached out to the TCU Assistant Director of Student Activities Brad Thompson. Here’s his story (and it’s probably a lot like yours!)

What’s Their Problem Anyway?

Brad Thompson is responsible for collaborating with the school’s marketing team, along with 30+ student volunteers, to launch more than 600 events per year. And with limited resources, this is a colossal undertaking.

As the Assistant Director of Student Activities, Brad is always looking for ways to build a bigger brand, generate more awareness, and more efficiently communicate with staff, students, and other on campus personnel.

Every week, Brad sends 10k to 20k emails while also managing a robust social media presence. His focus is simple: to increase student involvement.

Show Me The Money!

Within any university environment, there is regular questioning regarding KPIs, marketing efforts, budget, and return on investment (ROI). Brad had no data to back up his hard work. Having access to data helps with the following:

Justifying implemented marketing strategies.

Introducing new marketing channels.

Calculating and communicating return on investment.

Forecasting.

Bringing credibility to what Brad is working so hard to do!

What Did They Find Out?

Despite his best efforts, Brad was unable to find a solution to his biggest challenges. During the summer of 2015, however, he came across Dasheroo.

He said, “I found Dasheroo over the summer, right after their launch. I had been dreaming of an business analytics dashboard for over three years and had yet to find anything. I had trials with a couple other providers, but ultimately found that Dasheroo offered the features I need and is also the easiest to use.We are now obsessed with Dasheroo!”

After connecting with Dasheroo, Brad soon experienced its true power. Early on, he used a Dasheroo dashboard to learn more about the email marketing service, Emma (an integrated partner of Dasheroo).

From there, the university jumped on board with Emma, thanks in large part to its Dasheroo integration.

Brad noted a variety of other benefits provided by the Dasheroo dashboard:

It’s a simple integration, clean, and access to all metrics in one spot.

It gives the ability to pull up information anytime, anywhere, with all data continually updated, even on a mobile device.

It integrates with their much used applications; Emma, Facebook ads, Google Analytics, and other platforms.

With a focus on email marketing, Brad and his team have found the Emma integration to be a lifesaver.

“For email marketing, the response metrics are huge. Furthermore, we want to grow our site beyond students, and once again, a targeted email marketing strategy can assist with this.”

When asked about his favorite feature, Brad didn’t waste a minute:

“I love that we have all of our data in once place. We really value data collection, but it’s spread across so many platforms that it gets to be overwhelming. Dasheroo puts our data together, making it both intuitive to understand and easy to act on.”

Now What?

Moving forward, the TCU Student Activities department plans on doing more marketing for public events.

While most their current efforts revolve around Facebook, the team wants to expand their approach and touch on other social channels, such as Instagram.

Brad has taken advantage of many features provided by Dasheroo, while also using the dashboard to learn more about Emma. This will lead to the addition of other apps to help with events, surveys, e-commerce and more to have a true marketing dashboard.

“We’ve connected Google Analytics, Facebook, Facebook ads, and Emma. From here, we want to look into a payment integration for paid events, and will consider all Dasheroo integrations that may be able to help.”

We love it when our users take the time to give us real feedback both positive and negative for our business dashboards. So we asked Daniel Codella over at Zurb to answer some questions for us.

Zurb is a pretty cool company based here in the Bay Area. According to Zurb, “ZURB is a product design company since 1998. Through consulting, product design tools and training, we transform the way businesses approach product design.”

Thanks for taking the time Daniel!

How many employees work at Zurb?

Daniel: There’s about 25 of us, including contractors here at ZURB. We’re broken up into four business groups and multiple teams. I’m ZURB’s sole marketer and a member of our Connections team, responsible for building relationships, increasing communication and putting people first!

That’s awesome! What did you use before you found Dasheroo? How long did it take you to gather your metrics?

Daniel: Ugh. Before Dasheroo? That was painful! I would often create custom dashboards using Google Docs and Google Analytics. While you can do some very cool things there, it was difficult for me and I’d often mess them up. I explored a few other business dashboard apps and services but I found them either to be too difficult or not flexible enough. As hard as a I tried, I just couldn’t find that one product that showed me all the metrics that were important to me in an easy to use way.

Building and managing these custom dashboards and updating my docs really started to get time consuming and took me away from my actual work. I would spend several hours a week gathering, organizing and presenting the data, hours I could have spent actually doing my job to make those numbers move.

What were the most important features you needed in a dashboard for Zurb?

Daniel: In addition to all of the big health indicators of our popular marketing channels, I needed to be able to easily and quickly see my email metrics to look for patterns, correlations, and other insights. I also needed to compare all of these KPIs with some custom numbers I keep in Google Sheets. All of these streams of data needed to be easy to compare and analyze so I could break down the information for my team and ultimately act on the data.

Did you gain any new insight using Dasheroo?

Daniel: Absolutely. To easily see patterns and trends, to be able to spot correlations at a glance, all of this was previously unavailable to me but has fundamentally changed my tactics and strategies. I can act quickly to maintain momentum but also observe longterm movement and respond appropriately. Because Dasheroo integrates with just about anything, I can compare all kinds of data, even the special custom stuff I keep in my docs. On top of that, the charts and graphs it generates are beautiful and add some really pizazz to my reports and presentations. Accurate data is most important of course, but the added perk of having that data displayed in such a vivd way helps me convey things to the team in a way they can really understand. The more members of my team that have access to and understand the data, the better decisions we can make as a company.

Does more than one team member use Dasheroo? What other functions in the company?

Daniel: Two of our “Customer Advocates” use Dasheroo to gather data on how people are using our various products and services. We also regularly share Dasheroo graphs and charts with company leadership and at our weekly scrums.